Chapter One
Somocista Women, Right-Wing Politics, and Feminism in Nicaragua, 1936-1979
Victoria González
In 1979, Nicaraguan women overwhelmingly supported the leftist Sandinista revolution that brought an end to forty-three years of right-wing Somoza dictatorship. More than two decades later, Nicaragua has the strongest women's movement in Central America. These facts led scholars to maintain that women in Nicaragua first organized politically on the left and that their political and feminist awakening occurred recently—within the last twenty years. I propose an alternative understanding of Nicaraguan women's history.
Nicaraguan women have been politically active for generations, and as early as 1837, in fact, there had been an interest in eliminating the tyranny of male domination. This interest grew into full-fledged campaigns for woman suffrage and access to education for women in the 1880s. By the 1920s a small, urban, predominantly middle-class group of Nicaraguan women began to call itself "feminist." Nicaragua boasted a vibrant feminist movement in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s. In the decades that followed, however, early twentieth-century feminism in Nicaragua was erased from the nation's historical memory. A new generation of women appropriated the feminist movement, transforming it into a partisan, pro-Somoza, nonfeminist women's movement. By 1957, the year women first had the opportunity to vote, the Somozas took all the credit for woman suffrage, ignoring feminist contributions to that struggle.
Thousands upon thousands of women voluntarily supported the Somozas and their right-wing Nationalist Liberal Party (PLN) between 1936 and 1979. These women self-identified as supporters of the Somozas and the Liberal Party. As a group, they were nominally Catholic, middle- and working-class urban women who lived on the country's Pacific Coast and Central Highlands. The first generation of Somocista women was impressive, for it was a generation of firsts: it included the nation's first female attorneys, the first female mayors, and so forth. This group of women, born in the 1920s, also included a large number of public school teachers. Many were unmarried.
Somocista women as a whole backed the Somoza family and its Liberal Party in exchange for suffrage and increased political, educational, and economic opportunities. They backed the Somozas' clientelistic system in part because they received goods, services, and (most important) jobs in exchange for their votes and political support. Many were also attracted to the Somozas' populist leadership style, their anticommunism, their economic policies, and the Liberal Party's long-standing position in favor of women's secular education and woman suffrage—a position very much at odds with the Conservative anti-Somocista tradition, but typical among Liberals throughout Latin America. Somocista women, however, were never a homogeneous group, not even politically, and they were certainly not naive. Most did not support every, action the Somozas took. And they supported patron-clientelism as long as they considered it to be a fair exchange. In the mid-1970s, once they felt that the system was falling apart, some Somocista women became Sandinista supporters.
Although Somocista women worked hard to secure increased access to employment, education, and public office for women, they were not feminists. Their primary concern was the well-being of their male-dominated party. Women's issues always took second place. In this respect, Somocista women shared a great deal with Sandinista women. Additionally, they shared a lack of organizational autonomy within their parties. Both groups were originally mobilized from above, within women's sections of their parties. Somocistas were organized in the Ala Femenina del Partido Liberal Nacionalista (the Feminine Wing of the Nationalist Liberal Party). Sandinistas were organized in AMPRONAC (Asociación de Mujeres ante la Problematica Nacional) in the late 1970s and then in AMNLAE (Asociación de Mujeres Nicaragüenses Luisa Amanda Espinoza) in the 1980s and 1990s. To make this comparison between Somocista and Sandinista women is heresy in many Sandinista and pro-Sandinista circles, for FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front) members and sympathizers find it hard to admit similarities between themselves and supporters of a bloody dictatorship. Just as controversial is my contention that maternalism (the exaltation of motherhood promoted as policy by many rightwing governments), which played a crucial role in anti-Somocista women's mobilization, played a relatively minor one in Somocista women's activism.
The disappearance, jailing, and assassination of thousands of young people by the Somozas' National Guard forced anti-Somocista women to organize as mothers. Anti-Somocista women adopted a maternalist discourse rarely seen among Somocista activists. Surprisingly, perhaps, the Somozas—unlike other right-wing regimes—did not emphasize women's roles as mothers as the only appropriate ones for women. Nonetheless, Somocista women did sometimes mobilize as mothers, especially in their fight against communism, suggesting that maternalism acquires greater importance in the context of war or when there is a possibility of war. Another instance in which maternalism prevailed within Somocismo was in the discourse of individual working women looking for jobs or economic assistance within the clientelistic system. It was precisely in order to fulfill their roles as female heads of households that some working-class women supported the dictatorship, hoping to advance economically in exchange for their pro-Somoza votes.
To the dismay of many Conservatives, the Somozas mobilized women politically and economically, incorporating them into the modern Nicaraguan state through state employment. Although statistics vary depending on the study, there was a gradual increase in the percentage of women employed outside the home between the 1950s and the 1970s. According to Gary Ruchwarger, in 1950 women constituted 14 percent of the economically active population. This percentage climbed to 21.9 percent in 1970, reflecting a significant increase in the number of professional women. A study conducted in 1974 by the business school INCAE (Instituto Centroamericano de Administración de Empresas) revealed that women represented 47 percent of the professional/technical sector in the urban zones of Masaya and León. In these same cities, 39 percent of the employers and administrators and 70 percent of the workers in commerce and sales were female. Forty-three percent of the economically active population in these two cities was made up of women, the same percentage reflected at the national level among the urban population. This increase in women's labor force participation—primarily the increase in the professional and technical fields—was surely related to the enlargement of the Nicaraguan middle class, which went from being 11 percent of the population in 1960 to 15 percent in 1975.
Like most of the world, Nicaragua had experienced an economic depression during the 1930s; by the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, an economic upturn was evident. There was another downswing in the mid-1950s followed by an upsurge in the 1960s. Statistics indicate that many among the upper and middle classes benefited from these growth-recession cycles, leading to the increase of the nation's middle class. By the mid-1970s, however, the Nicaraguan economy had begun a downward turn, taking its toll on the entire population and particularly on women. Although there are discrepancies in the figures regarding urban unemployment, it appears to have been higher among women than men during the last years of the dictatorship. The 1974 census indicates that the percentage of unemployed urban men was 6.4 percent, compared to 7.2 percent of women. Increasing unemployment and the general crisis that engulfed the country in 1978 and 1979 did not diminish the faith of those women who even today claim to be Somocistas and who, with pride, proclaim that under the Somozas, "we all made up the Liberal Party." But it did make even the most firm supporters of the regime admit that the last Somoza "might have gone too far."
While the state sector was expanding, the Somozas had been able to offer women jobs as state employees (positions as teachers, nurses, pharmacists, judges, lawyers, secretaries, receptionists, telegraph and telephone operators, bank tellers, social workers, day care workers, dietitians, laboratory technicians, cooks, cleaning personnel in public buildings, and the like). When the economy suffered, women's participation in formal economic sectors was curtailed. The Somozas nonetheless had mobilized women across different economic sectors, some of which grew during hard economic times. In addition to making a special effort to target teachers and professionals, the Somozas made an effort to mobilize the largely female market sellers and prostitutes. Members of these two groups would support the regime over the long term. The figure of the prostitute, in fact, came to symbolize the moral corruption of the dictatorship for those on the left. Brothels were among the first buildings to be destroyed during the Sandinista revolution in 1979, and dozens of prostitutes were jailed, to be eventually "rehabilitated" by the Sandinista state. The political mobilization of these "women of ill repute" and the Somozas' institutionalization of prostitution for the economic gain of their National Guard left anti-Somocistas in Nicaragua equating all Somocista women's activism with prostitution. Two additional factors caused the Somoza period to be remembered—even today—as one of extreme sexual chaos and corruption, one in which the Somozas' female supporters are supposed to have been particularly corrupt. The opposition was outraged by the state-sponsored sexual violence against anti-Somocista women—and the personal role male members of the Somoza family played in the sexual torture of their victims—as well as the incorporation of urban women into the labor force.
Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, the vocal opposition leader assassinated by the Somozas in 1978, described the Somoza period as "the total inversion of the moral values of Nicaraguan life: prostitutes against mothers, alcohol against civic duty, blackmail against honesty, lowlifes against citizenry." The triumph of mothers against prostitutes was the situation Nicaragua faced in 1979. But what about the right-wing traditions so many Nicaraguan women had embraced over the course of the century? Had these simply disappeared? Knowledge of these traditions can help explain why so many women voted against the Sandinistas in 1990, why so many voted in favor of a right-wing Liberal candidate in 1996, and why the dictatorship lasted so long in the first place. The examination of sexual politics under the dictatorship is also crucial to our understanding of more recent political developments in Nicaragua. The fact that the Somoza years are characterized today as ones of sexual disorder is a political victory for the FSLN and the Conservative Party, the Somozas' official opposition, for it means that the official Somocista discourse which portrayed the regime as orderly did not prevail. Ironically, however, the image of sexual chaos under the Somozas was popularized precisely because it reinforced already-established societal restrictions (upheld by a significant sector of anti-Somocistas) against women in public. The condemnation of women in public prevalent among Conservatives helps explain the way in which Violeta Barrios de Chamorro justified her presidency (1990-96). She was heir to the Conservative Party's tradition, which extolled women's maternal and domestic roles in society. Therefore, she had to justify her participation in politics through maternalist rhetoric, proclaiming to be "the Mother of the Nicaraguans." Doña Violeta was rectifying not only ten years of Sandinista gender policies but also the previous forty-three years of Liberal Somocista ones, many of which did not coincide with Conservative views on women.
The links between dictatorship and prostitution affected not only the Somozas' Conservative opposition; they also had a profound effect on the Sandinistas' gender policies. The FSLN leadership wasted no time in banning prostitution, doing so in the first few months after the triumph of the revolution. As Helen Collinson notes, "for the Sandinistas, prostitution epitomized all the wrongs of the Somoza regime." Clearly, then, the FSLN fashioned its policies on gender in direct response to the Somozas' corruption; the revolutionary "New Man" was not to engage in the sexual degradation of women (a characteristic of Somocista masculinity). Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that many Sandinistas in the 1990s defended former Sandinista President Daniel Ortega against accusations of rape and incest made by his stepdaughter, Zoilamérica Narváez. For many FSLN supporters, what Narváez claims Ortega did was unimaginable, because similar abuse had taken place under the Somozas and it was not supposed to occur under the Sandinistas.
Unlike Somocista women under the dictatorship, during the 1980s, Sandinista women as a group were spared the embarrassment and shame of supporting political figures accused of unthinkable sexual crimes. This changed abruptly in 1998, once Narváez's accusations were made public. In spite of this unexpected turn of events in Nicaraguan history, which underscores the similarities between the Somoza dictatorship and the Sandinista revolution, important differences between the experiences of Somocista and Sandinista women must be stressed. Somocista women defended a regime that systematically oppressed women through state-sponsored prostitution rings and the rape of female prisoners. The FSLN was not accused of such things. And although both Somocista and Sandinista women were treated as public women (sexually loose women) by their enemies for assuming public political and economic roles in society, there is one other crucial difference in their mobilization, beyond the obvious political differences: the mobilization of Sandinista women, and their struggle for autonomy from the FSLN, eventually led to the emergence of a "second wave" of feminism in Nicaragua. By comparison, the mobilization of Somocista women and their acceptance of their dependent status effectively co-opted Nicaragua's first wave of feminism and delayed the re-emergence of feminism in the second half of the twentieth century.
Organizationally, this chapter consists of three parts. The first traces the mid-twentieth-century transition from feminism to a Somocista women's movement. The second addresses the Somocista women's movement. And the third sheds light on the relationship between sex and politics during the Somozas' regime. Because of its importance, I discuss in depth the Ala Femenina's role in erasing feminism from Nicaraguan history. I also address the role the Ala played in upholding the dictatorship. The working-class leader Nicolasa Sevilla—an alleged prostitute and madam—was a major figure among Somocista women; therefore, her contributions to the regime are also explored here. The chapter concludes by taking us back to the topics of maternalism, prostitution, and Somocista sexual politics.
Continues...
Excerpted from Radical Women in Latin America by Victoria Gonzalez Copyright © 2001 by Victoria Gonzalez. Excerpted by permission.
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